Unseen Academicals
by Terry Pratchett
2009, 400 p.
Read October 7, 2009

When the book showed up four days early, I had to read it immediately.  One should take signs like this to heart.  (Also, when one has three other newly-published books in the reading queue, one has little time for messing around.)

I have to digress just a little—though is it a digression if you do it before you begin?—to say how pleased I was to see the Discworld novels “for younger readers” included in their proper places in the full list of books by Terry Pratchett.  Many lists will put these three (or four) books separately, as though somehow adult readers need to be warned that they aren’t the real thing.  Aside from having more condensed plots, younger protagonists, and real live chapter breaks, there’s nothing that makes them unsuitable for older readers as well.  The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable, an illustrated novel, is also included in the list, which makes Unseen Academicals both a great book and a great reference tool for obsessives like me who organize the series in publication order on the shelf and aren’t snobbish about kids’ books and graphic novels.

(The juveniles, for those keeping track at home, are The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, a retelling of the Pied Piper story; and The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith (not always listed as a juvenile), which are about Tiffany Aching, novice witch and Noticer of Things.)

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Unseen Academicals is the 37th Discworld novel, and the difference between it and both the earlier books I’ve recently read (#12 and #14 respectively) is in some respects enormous.  It has a feeling of depth and history that makes perfect sense if, as I’ve earlier pointed out, you take into account how much more material Pratchett has to work with now.  On the other hand, it’s just as funny and moving and satisfying as you’d expect a Discworld novel to be.  I wouldn’t ever recommend starting the series at this end, simply because the reading experience is enriched by a familiarity with everything that’s gone before, but Unseen Academicals would not be terribly overwhelming for a new reader.

In this novel, the newly-appointed Master of The Traditions (Ponder Stibbons, who now has so many jobs that twelve of the council positions are held by him) has discovered another tradition the University hasn’t been upholding.  By the terms of a very lucrative bequest, the University has to field a “foot-the-ball” team; if they go for more than twenty years without doing so, they lose the money—which would mean about a 13% decrease in the food budget.  This is the only sort of threat a wizard finds compelling.  So, despite the fact that foot-the-ball has become a vicious, bloody sport only the lower classes play, Unseen University attacks the problem with all the single-mindedness they apply to any problem, i.e. figure out a way to game the system.  (No pun intended.  Seriously.  Pratchett supplies enough of his own that it’s completely unnecessary for me to join in.)

This is the framework of the novel, but not the plot.  The plot centers on four people who work in the bowels of the University: Glenda and Juliet, laborers in the Night Kitchen (you know wizards have midnight buffets rather than midnight snacks, right?) and Trevor and Nutt, creators of appropriately dribbly candles down in the vats.  Juliet is beautiful and dim and a supporter of the Dolly Sisters foot-the-ball team; Glenda is large, intelligent, and a talented pie chef who watches out for Juliet and hates and loves her by turns.  Trevor is the son of the late Dave Likely, a legendary football player who died in the game.  He’s got a lot of native talent, but promised his mother he would never play the game, so instead he’s a strong supporter of the Dimwell team.  For symmetry, Trev looks out for Nutt, who is…a mystery.  Round-headed, gray-skinned, possessed of a posh accent and an extraordinary vocabulary, Nutt appears to be a goblin but demonstrates none of that race’s vicious habits.  He has had a terrible childhood and now has a patroness longtime readers will immediately recognize as Lady Margolotta of Uberwald; this alone suggests that there is more to Nutt than is evident.  Though Nutt is clearly far more intelligent than Trev and seems to be able to master almost any skill (making perfectly dribbly candles in practically no time, for starters) it’s Trev who makes sure Nutt isn’t bothered by outsiders and teaches him the finer points of human society.

So the plot comes down to the entanglement of these initial partnerships.  Trevor and Juliet, inevitably, fall in love (it looks like a Romeo and Juliet story at first, but that’s not where it goes, thank goodness; even Pratchett can only shoehorn so much plot into one story), and Glenda becomes attached to the strange little (or big? does his size really change, and why?) Nutt, who is himself a devotee of her pies.  As fascinating as the football part of the story is, it’s Nutt’s growth and the revelation of his secret that make this novel outstanding.

I’m always torn between how much to tell about a plot.  Most of what I write is not strictly review in the sense of something that is trying to sell a book; those reviews can’t give away the plot without undermining their purposes.  I am more interested in a critical approach, which talks about how a book works and has to be able to refer to plot points to do so.  But I’m also aware that many of the people reading this will not have read the book, and I don’t want to give anything away (especially to the guy who has my copy right now and may or may not have finished it since Saturday night).  So there’s a lot I can’t say that I would dearly love to talk about right now.  For example, the re-invention of the football, Nutt’s role as Unseen University team coach, how Glenda changed history with one little sartorial suggestion, what really happened to the Dean that no one’s talking about, or…well, there’s more.  Lots more.

One thing I can talk about is the way Pratchett once again undermines character stereotypes.  Glenda, for example.  She’s a fat girl, to put it bluntly, but there’s never any suggestion that she pines over being thin or thinks less of herself for being unable to lose weight.  By the end of the book, she’s a plausible romantic heroine for the qualities she already has.  And Nutt is simply adorable.  He reminds me very strongly of a character from another novel and it’s killing me that I can’t remember who it is.  Every time he came on scene, I had the strongest feeling I’d met him before.  It’ll come to me eventually.

And, finally, there’s all the intertextual weaving and bobbing we expect from Pratchett.  I loved, for example, the scene where the Patrician is doing the crossword (as he has in other books) and mentions that the woman writing them is someone previously mentioned as one of only two other people would could solve a cryptic crossword as fast as he does.  No drawing attention to it; it’s just a little thing for the long-time reader to be amused by.  There’s also a return to the “bottle covey” theme previously used in Men at Arms (with Big Fido) and The Fifth Elephant (with Angua’s brother Wolfgang) in Andy, Trevor’s nemesis and the ultimate antagonist faced by the UU team in the game at the end of the book.

Every new Discworld novel is a source of delight and sorrow, as Terry Pratchett’s illness makes it ever more likely that the next book will be the last.  It’s some consolation to know that if Unseen Academicals is the final book, it’s a great one to go out on.

Lords and Ladies
Terry Pratchett
1992, 314 pp.
Read September 24, 2009

Lords and Ladies is the third volume in the Discworld sub-series starring the Three Witches, but my most recent reading of it came before re-reading Witches Abroad.  My Discworld reading tends to follow a complicated algorithm based on time elapsed since the last reading rather than chronological sequence.  (Meaning that it’s almost completely random.)

In this installment, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick have just returned from the extended vacation they began at the end of Witches Abroad. Now that her godmothering duties are over, Magrat can return to obsessing about her personal life—namely, her relationship with Verence, former Fool and current King of Lancre.  But the witches soon discover they have bigger problems.  A group of young wannabe witches (the kind who wear black nail polish and too much eye makeup and give themselves “cool” names like Amanita) have been stirring up trouble around the stone circle called the Dancers.  The older residents of Lancre remember not to go there, and witches like Granny Weatherwax know what they were put up to protect against…but memory fades quickly, and the new young coven knows only that there’s power in that circle.  Even if they did know what they were drawing the attention of, what is there to fear, really, from—elves?

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Like the first two volumes in the Witches series, Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies takes a common idea from literature and turns it on its head.  In this case, it’s elves—those creatures of magic that have been part of contemporary fantasy literature since Tolkien picked up his pen and said “I should maybe have a race of people to speak this language I invented.”  Tolkien’s new race was related to the fairy folk of European myth only peripherally (it’s probably more accurate to say that Tolkien created a parallel mythology in which the memory of his elves dwindled into stories of brownies and dryads and smaller fairy creatures) but in fantasy literature the image of the tall, beautiful, mysterious elf became overlaid on the much older idea of creatures who steal away children and take harpers to play for them for a night that turns out to last a hundred years.  It’s that confluence of meaning that Pratchett plays with in Lords and Ladies:

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous.  They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic.  They create fantasies.
Elves are glamourous.  They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting.  They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific.  They beget terror.

In Lords and Ladies, the elves are trapped in a parasite universe, unable to enter our world unless someone gives them a way in.  Once in, they dominate and ensnare ordinary humans with their beauty and, well, glamour—their ability to convince humans that they are worthless compared to elves, preying on that deep-down insecurity almost everyone feels sometime to make humans not only worship them, but believe it’s the natural order to do so.  Pratchett points out that it is a human characteristic to admire and even worship the beautiful people: how much attention do actors get, or models, or rock stars?  This is a criticism that’s been made over and over again, and it would be easy enough for Pratchett to simply riff off the shallowness of human feelings in this book.  But he has something bigger in mind here.  One of the themes that runs most strongly through the Discworld novels is the idea of balance and reciprocity:  you cannot get something for nothing.  Both Granny Weatherwax (as a young woman) and Diamanda Tockley, leader of the new coven, were drawn to the Elf Queen, who promised each unlimited power and respect.  What Granny saw that Diamanda did not was that power gained in such a way was ultimately hollow; in the end, Granny can hold off the Elf Queen’s compulsions not because she has more power, but because her power comes from something real.  While Pratchett has some scathing things to say about the human tendency to bow down to the superficial (more thoroughly explored in the Ankh-Morpork City Guards series) his real issue here is with those who take advantage of that weakness.

If human weakness lies in their ability to believe too well the superiority of others, human strength comes from their ability to believe in themselves.  Balancing the many characters in this book who are cowed by the elves are the ones who fight back:  Shawn Ogg, not terribly bright, perceives the elvish threat and then endures torture to protect Magrat; Mr. Brooks, the royal beekeeper, has killed too many wasps not to recognize them however beautifully they’re dressed up.  And Magrat.  Ah, Magrat.  She had a moment of strength in Witches Abroad, standing up to the “evil stepsisters,” but the moment when she dons the spiky armor of Queen Ynci the Evil Tempered and goes out to rescue her man is simply brilliant.  It’s also a testament to the positive power of belief; bolstered by the thought of this ancient queen, Magrat finally stops being a wet hen, if only for a little while.  That’s Ynci’s winged helmet on the cover art of the latest HarperCollins release.  (The denouement to this particular storyline is even better.)

Because this is a Discworld novel, there are so many more plotlines I haven’t mentioned.  Jason Ogg and his “rude mechanicals” playing out A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with Morris dancing.  The battle between Granny Weatherwax and Diamanda to outstare the sun.  The return of Casanunda, the world’s second greatest lover, and the revelation of Archchancellor Ridcully’s long-ago relationship with Granny Weatherwax.  Granny’s amazing triumph over the Elf Queen.  Most importantly, the introduction of Agnes “Perdita” Nitt, who becomes a major character in this sub-series beginning with Maskerade.  Lords and Ladies  has a depth to it that is lacking from the earlier Witches books, not just because Terry Pratchett continues to get better with every book, but because as the series progresses there is so much more material for him to draw on and refer to (this is the fourteenth published Discworld book).  Not only is Lords and Ladies excellent in its own right, it promises great things to come in the rest of the series.

I don’t know if it’s human nature or Western culture or what, but most people I know collect things:  Hallmark ornaments, football cards, historical memorabilia, Precious Moments Sugar Town figures, and so on.  Some things are designed to be collectible (like trading cards or Beanie Babies, and I’d love to meet the evil genius who came up with Neopets) and others just accrue thanks to a hobby or interest.  I find it’s easier to explain my book collection when I put it in terms of a collection rather than in terms of individual books.  If you think of a book as just the vehicle for a reading experience, there’s not much point in keeping many of them around, and no point at all in owning books you don’t intend to read any time soon.  A collector like myself sees things differently.  I love to read, and I love to be surrounded by books; the books I own represent not only my enjoyment of having read them, but a collection I take pleasure in expanding.

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Expanding my collection is, in fact, one of my favorite activities.  Since I am a cheapskate very frugal, I especially like buying used books.  It used to be my husband Greystoke and I would celebrate our wedding anniversary by spending the day hitting as many used-book stores as we could handle.  Then we moved to a city which is remarkably lacking in those stores despite its size.  Gaaaaah.  Fortunately, there are compensations: this city is packed to the brim with thrift stores and, by the look of it, populated by people who have no problem donating practically new books to charity.  My mother is the queen of finding great deals at yard sales; I’ve inherited her talent, but in me it only applies to books.  On my last trip to the local thrift store, I spent $17 and picked up, among other things:

• a nearly new copy of Point Blank for my son the Alex Rider fan, easily cleaned up
• several books to give away to young friends at Christmas for 33 cents apiece
• the third volume of the Emily books by L.M. Montgomery, completing the trilogy after eight years of searching (and I think these are superior to the Anne of Green Gables books in a lot of ways, if not as endearing)
• an unabridged copy of The Count of Monte Cristo (not the translation I wanted, but now I have it)
• a pristine copy of Six Easy Pieces by my hero, Richard Feynman (the day I find Tuva or Bust! you will hear me shouting all the way to Asia)
• and the true find, a shrink-wrapped, never-opened brand-new copy of John Adams, cover price $40, price paid by me $5

There are a lot of things I look for when I go out hunting.  First, I have a list in my head of books I’m particularly interested in—the ones I buy, no question, if ever I find them.  This list originated when I ended up paying $20 for a book I could have bought new for $8.95 if I hadn’t been so sure it would always be available.  I also have a list of series I’m collecting, filling in the holes.  Then there are the books I’ve heard good things about that I’d like to read someday, or books by authors I’ve enjoyed reading in the past.  I also look for high-quality copies of excellent books I might want to give to friends and classic literature some neighborhood kid might need to borrow for school.  (We never had summer reading when I was in high school, but I guess it’s common now for a teacher to assign a Super Long Deadly Tome of Classicity to be read before the beginning of school.  This puts an enormous strain on the public library, since they can’t afford to provide copies of the Tome to everyone.  I had two kids come to me this year looking for books that I did not, in fact, own, which was an embarrassing black mark on my reputation.  I hide my face in shame.)  Except for that first list, I’m also looking for books that are in very good shape; I’ll buy a beater if it’s a book I’m sort of interested in reading but don’t expect to want to keep, but because mine is a lending library I need books that aren’t going to fall apart with a little hard use.

I do have some self control.  Our house is not big enough for me to have a library all my own, and the books live in double-stacked shelves in two separate rooms; I’m considering forcing the kids to host branches of the library in their own rooms.  So I don’t buy absolutely everything I have a whim to because there just isn’t room and I’m not yet deranged enough to line every available space (like hallways) with bookshelves.  Still, I enjoy walking into what’s referred to as “the library” (which is actually the library-schoolroom-playroom-storeroom) and being surrounded by all those lovely lovely books.  Or being able to reshelve the ones that have been loaned out or read.  In fact, right now there’s a stack by the stairway that needs to be taken care of….

The Talisman Ring
Georgette Heyer
1936 (republished 2009), 303 pp.
Read September 21, 2009

I was introduced to Georgette Heyer’s books about ten or twelve years ago, right in the middle of a period when her books were practically unknown to the American market.  Sure, people had heard of her—mostly women of the generation before mine—but finding the books was nearly impossible.  Libraries had long since remaindered them.  Used bookstores rarely had any (because those copies were all being snapped up by people like me) and you could forget about retailers even knowing who Heyer was.  Now things are very different, and you can find almost all of Heyer’s books in your local bookstore, in many different editions.  I’m grateful for this, because I never did find a used copy of The Talisman Ring.  I missed out on Harlequin’s 2000 edition, but in March of this year I picked up an even nicer one published by Sourcebooks Casablanca.  Isn’t it pretty?  (The link shows a different cover for some reason, but it’s the same book.)

Anyway, Georgette Heyer would be a guilty pleasure of mine if there were anything at all guilty about enjoying some of the best romance fiction ever produced.  She wrote mysteries and historical fiction as well, but her romances are probably her best-known works.  Heyer is credited with inventing the Regency romance genre (set in the Regency period of English history, 1811 to 1820, when King George III had gone completely doo-lally and his son George, later King George IV, had to rule in his place as Prince Regent) and did exhaustive research to recreate the times, customs, fads and habits of this period for many of her novels.

(And no, Jane Austen did not beat her to it.  Austen was writing within that time period, about that time period, and her books are contemporary; a Regency romance is a type of historical fiction, in which the author is writing about a time period earlier than the one he or she is living in.  Heyer owes a great debt to Austen’s thoroughness in detailing her own time, and Austen owes Heyer for books that have led who knows how many ordinary readers to Pride and Prejudice.)

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Though The Talisman Ring takes place about fifteen years before the Regency period, it is still, like many of Heyer’s books, a romance with many different threads woven together to make a plot—smugglers, a lost heirloom, at least two romances, and a missing heir wrongly accused of murder.  Sober and sensible Sir Tristram Shield has agreed to marry his great-uncle Sylvester’s granddaughter Eustacie, a romantic girl lately escaped from the guillotine and not at all fond of her boring cousin.  Eustacie runs away from home headlong into the clutches of smugglers whose leader turns out to be none other than her other cousin Ludovic, heir to Sylvester, wrongly accused of murder some years back and unable to claim his inheritance.  When Ludovic is shot by Excisemen, Eustacie brings him to a local inn where they encounter Miss Sarah Thane, a level-headed young woman with a passion for adventure.  When Sir Tristram comes in search of his missing bride, they all become swept up in a plan to retrieve Ludovic’s talisman ring—the only thing that can prove his innocence.

One of the best things about discussing a Georgette Heyer book is being able to write synopses like the one above. 

The Talisman Ring’s plot is the stuff of Romance—not the kissy-face boy-meets-girl kind, but the robust old legends and lays of old.  This is a story Robert Louis Stevenson might have written, or Walter Scott.  And yet despite the intricate and involved description, this is actually a low-key, hilarious story, mostly because Heyer has a gift for subtle characterization.  The interplay between Sir Tristram and Miss Thane is comedic gold, as she spars playfully with him and he learns to give as good as he gets.  Eustacie’s dire proclamations, in which she imagines terrible things happening to her but sees only the dramatic potential for pathos in, say, the sight of a young girl dressed all in white going to the guillotine, could easily make her a figure of ridicule, but instead make her a funny, sweet, very young girl.  And Sir Tristram quickly goes from being a potentially boring and stodgy villain to figuring in a romance of his own.

Two romances in one story is neither usual nor rare for a Heyer novel.  However, it becomes evident when you’ve read a number of them that Heyer had a preference for romances between strong women and men who could match them.  While Eustacie and Ludovic’s dramatic, emotion-ridden romance is enjoyable, it’s the growing attachment between Sir Tristram and Sarah Thane that is the romantic center of the book—a center, moreover, that is in defiance of the “romantic” tangle of the plot.  Both Sir Tristram and Miss Thane are sensible people with a spark of mischief in their souls; both come to care for one another over the course of events that show these traits to their best advantage.  I suspect that this type of romance is Heyer’s greatest contribution to the genre.  That, and thirty-odd deliciously wonderful books like this one.

JPod
by Douglas Coupland
2006, 448 pp.
Read 9/18/09

Douglas Coupland’s books are a weird mix of surreality and stark reality, and none more so than JPod.  After several pages of seemingly random phrases, a stream of consciousness ramble spiced with catchphrases from spam email, and two and a half pages with nothing but dollar signs and the words “ramen noodles” repeated over and over again, we get to the first line of the book:

“Oh God.  I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.”

In premise and style it’s sort of a follow-up to the decade-earlier Microserfs, which chronicled the lives of a handful of computer geeks through narrative, email, bizarre lists and random (?) pages of newspaper headlines and snippets of product description.  JPod, however, takes this premise to the next level with even more absurdities and tangential leaps.  It follows the lives of six people who share a cubicle pod at a large Vancouver computer company, primarily Ethan, the narrator.  The novel’s name comes from the name of their pod, so called because all of them have a last name beginning with J (thanks to a computer error that assigned them by name rather than job description).  The interactions between these characters are what you’d expect from a Coupland novel: weird but strikingly familiar, outlandish but perfectly sensible.  It’s easy to fall into their reality and take for granted the strange ideas they come up with, like inventing a hugging machine or inserting secret levels of carnage into the hopelessly mundane kiddie skateboarding game their company is producing.  Depending on whether or not you know (or are) a programmer, JPod will either have you shaking your head in astonishment or nodding ruefully at its familiarity.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it didn’t move me the way Microserfs did.  Truthfully, the similarities between the two books are more superficial than anything else.  In Microserfs, the multimedia-style format was a vehicle for the story, and the main character was a shallow character who over the course of the novel learned to make connections and move beyond his status as a nameless code monkey.  In JPod, the story is really more about the format itself—about the basic randomness of life in which meaning and causality happen regardless of what you do.  This is not the slam it might sound like.  It’s true that in life, a lot of things happen because of events beyond our control.  Sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re not.  JPod takes this concept and enlarges it, exaggerates it, both to better show how true it is and because it’s hilarious.  But it’s hard to really love the characters or to connect with their lives, because they’re just a little too exaggerated for comfort.  Laugh at, sympathize with, cheer for, yes; connect with, not so much.

As self-referential as this book is, the most self-referential thing about it is that the author is an actual character in his own book.  Ethan meets Coupland on a flight to China, and again a number of other times, with the result being that Coupland steals all the data from Ethan’s laptop and uses it to write this very book.  You can practically see JPod trying to swallow its own tail.  (One of my favorite bits is how Ethan describes gazing into Coupland-the-character’s eyes as “like looking into wells filled with drowned toddlers.” Is that great or what?)  Better than this, however, is that Coupland provides the voice of reality within the story.  So much goes on in this book—Ethan’s mother runs a marijuana grow-op in her basement; he helps her bury a dead biker; his brother gets tangled up with a Chinese crime lord; Ronald McDonald becomes the avatar for Jpod’s gruesome secret video game—and it’s surprising how easy it is, as a reader, to go along with the madness.  But Coupland leaves Ethan a message, after first reading his files:  “You live in a world that is amoral and fascinating…but, for the love of God, grow up. Or read something outside your normal sphere or use what few savings you have…and go to a college or university.”  Ethan’s world is amoral, but then what do we make of Coupland-as-character criticizing the characters and situations Coupland-as-writer has created?

I can’t explain my love affair with Coupland’s novels.  Is it the release of reading a purely surreal novel?  The comfort of knowing that my own life will never be that screwed up?  Coupland’s masterful understanding of human nature?  Probably a little of all of the above.  I just hope I never start to feel like a refugee from a Coupland novel.